Lebanese Entrepreneurs Know How to Party

November 27, 2010 - Karaj Beirut witnessed Lebanon's first dedicated party for entrepreneurs. The occasion? Global Entrepreneurship Week's closing event. Dubbed the Small Wins and Ecosystem Party, it called for all entrepreneurs and those who are active in the entrepreneurship community to meet up, mingle and tell everyone what they have been up to.

Managed and launched by Seeqnce's Samer Karam, the event was able to bring together around two hundred attendees from every corner of the Lebanese creative world. People from all walks of life - freelancers, CEOs, creative directors, university students, design gurus, programers, entrepreneurs, Non-Profit program managers, etc. - were, for the first time, in a non-proffesional atmosphere: a party.

Beer, wine, whiskey

food and good music are perfect ingredients for any party. But when you add entrepreneurs to the mix, it's different. Networking and meeting new people was suddenly natural and ubiquitous. People were pitching their ideas left and right. Entrepreneurs stood on packs of red bull to speak and both, men and women, shared the same passion in exchanging business cards.

Small wins not so small

Among the ten speakers who got the opportunity to speak for 30 seconds are Samer Nakfour from Nodio, Mackram Raydan from Cuevox and Fadi Bizri from Iltaqi. I also spoke about the TEDxBeirut that I'm helping in organizing and will happen sometime in 2011.

What's a party

without dancing to good music? When the clock hit 1:00 am, the dance floor, previously known as Karaj Beirut, was filled. Developers danced with designers and CEOs had dance-offs with freelancers. Well not specifically the case but you get my gist. Somehow, Beirut always gives good people great nights.

The event was such a success, that the organizers have decided to make it a quarterly event. GEW Small Wins Ecosystem Party, definitely a big win

Participated in YallaStartup Weekend

There are three things that you musy know
about last weekend,

1. YallaStartup is an NGO founded by three inspiring entrepreneurs: Elie Khoury, Habib Haddad and Sami Shalabi. They all founded their diffrent companies like Woopra and Yamli. YallaStartup focuses on helping startups. And last weekend, on November 12, they brought to the Middle East
   
2. StartupWeekend,
   
   which is a global event that happens in cities all around the world where developers, businessmen, graphic artists, entrepreneurs, engineers... etc. meet up and build a working prototype of their ideas in 54 hours (1 weekend). For the first time, it happened here, in the Middle East, Lebanon. More specifically at
   
   
3. Berytech's amazing center in Mansouriyeh, right outside of Beirut. Berytech is a Lebanon-based incubator for SME as well as startups.
   Now I could narrate how 300 hundred people from Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria met, pitched their ideas, made teams, worked with people they've never seen before and presented a WORKING PROTOTYPE of their ideas in 54 hours... But I'm going to let you watch it instead
   

Read the tweets through the hashtag: #YSWLB
Check out the picture on Flicker on: this
And watch the whole thing here, on the video below! (Beware, its two hours long!)



As to what I did, I worked as a designer for Kazdoor by Hassan Baydoun. I designed the iPhone App that will allow people to have all of their loyalty card on their phone. On the video above, you can see me presenting at: 1:50:00. More about Kazdoor coming up

Wowed by Rifflex

Rifflex is a web startup by my friend Abdallah Absi. He's eighteen years old and this is his first year at AUB. Regardless, he fully developed his company (he has many other companies by the way) and just released a new feature.

Rifflex is all about turning the internet into your tool. Basically, you can easily make an app that does practically anything on Rifflex then use it. The process looks a lot like making mind maps.

BUT! The new feature, which is a side bar that you can fully customize and can include apps that you made or you want to use. RSS feeds, notes, MTC balance, chat.... All of it just shows up when you click a small arrow on the right of your browser.

My Student Takes Over My Blog

Ahmad Moussa, I know I will see you tomorrow but I want to thank you for making the Better Than a Millionaire Blog.

www.betterthanamillionaire.blogspot.com


I think it's amazing that he is now the teacher. What Ahmad did is make a blog about the elective class I teach at the International College. He posts the main idea that was discussed in class. He now can share everything with his friends and I can learn from his blog too, to see what stuck and what didn't.

*Better Than a Millionaire is an elective class I teach at the International College of Ras Beirut. The class is about Entrepreneurship as a mind-set.

And here is a video he posted as a homework.

Today, Bader helped

The Entrepreneurship Club is planning a lot of things for AUB this semester and this is why we need Bader's help. Hadi and I went to their office in Mathaf to ask for the following:
-Internship possibilities for one of our competitions,
-Mentors for the other competition
-Antoine Abou Samra's confirmation that he will speak at our December 9 launching event and
-the answer to the question:"where can we get sponsorship?"
We got answers to all of our questions and it was good. We are now waiting for Rana Shmaitely's confirmation that she will speak at our lecture

Today, LBC came over

She told me they'll be here at eleven in the morning, but they got to my house at one in the afternoon. With all of their cameras, lights and mics, they ubiquitously set up camp and took over. They knew which TV to plug my computer in and which chair I should sit on. The goal was to explain the crowdmap I set up for Kalam el Nas which I hope, will be of great help for Lebanon.

(A crowdmap is a web-based map that visualizes people's reports and testimonies. I will telling you more about this later)

You sweat a lot when you are under the spot lights. And I got late to my class. Ms. Khishin called me and I told her to forgive me and she did. Ms. Rima Khishin is IC's elective co-ordinator and teacher and mentor and inspiration, among other things. My student's homework was to put a video on YouTube. Half of them did. Half didn't. So I decided to explain why I gave them that homework.

Rory spoke and they listened.


The moral of that talk was: small things are what counts and they are the ones that sometimes have the biggest impact. When they put a youtube video, they are contributing to the collective knowledge of the global community with small donations. And that doing good will bring to them good: google ads, fame, positive image, etc.

I hope I can sweat the small stuff.

Location:جامعة,,Lebanon